Version 5.5 Zebrina

Good evening everyone!

Today we are releasing version 5.5 of the bot, which has long been waited for by some users.
The main point of this version are the changes made by Playa to core functionalities since October 2022.

Dungeons

In particular, to keep the bot future-proof for the dungeons, we had to make some changes to the way the bot gains information about dungeon progress and attacks dungeon enemies.
In the course of this, we have also changed the settings so that you now have to ignore dungeons instead of explicitly enabling them in order to keep up with the inexorably growing number of dungeons in the future.

One of the advantages for us is that the dungeons automatically appear in the settings as soon as they are recognised in the bot and we have to do less graphic work.
For you, this has the advantage that you don’t have to hope for our kindness for new settings – even though the design can certainly be improved (we are happy to accept suggestions on this!).

Game features

Dungeons were a one of the bigger core points of SF’s latest changes on the new backend, others are listed in a thread on the SF Forum.
What looks like minimal small adjustments there, already shows in the game client itself with behavioural changes.
In the bot, we also had to go deeper, as (for us a bit unexpected) game mechanics were significantly changed in quite a few places – actually even simplifying for the future, but still an effort for the present :-D.

For those who don’t want to look at the thread above: The list includes collecting and unlocking/redeeming mirror and mirror pieces, the wheel of fortune, the underworld, the toilet, the scrapbook, the holy grail, the Alter Ego, pet items of any kind, dungeon keys and others.
So if there are any problems here, please report.

Miscellaneous

With this version we have again made a lot of corrections, including some that we had on the list for quite some time. For example, some of you will recognize crashes due to a corrupted bot.dat or the SMART quest settings in the changelog, as well as opening players/guild via the Hall of Fame window.

Pre-Announcement: Migration from .NET Framework 4 to .NET 6

At this point we would like to give advance warning that version 5.5 will be the last version series based on the .NET Framework.
The fact that the first version of the .NET Framework 4, on which the Bot has been based since its migration to .NET in 2013, is now 13 years old and that the .NET Framework version 4.6 has already reached EOL status in April 2022, does have importance for us, too.

Many things that make development easier for us and give the bot more options for maintainability and performance (e.g. a console without dependence on Mono and all the problems behind it that our console users are so familiar with) work better with the newer .NET versions based on .NET Core.
We would therefore like to switch to .NET 6 with the next major version, more details will follow in due course.

Have fun and a nice rest of the week!
Robin


You can find the download links and language packs on the downloads page!
You can find the changelog on the changelog page!